McGregor might have spent more time—or time at all—on certain well-known points on the Roman map (the Campo dei Fiori, the...
A pleasing history of Rome from antiquity to the modern era, tied to monuments, buildings and other structures throughout the city.
The heart of Rome is the Tiber River, and there McGregor (Comparative Literature/Univ. of Georgia) begins. “Like all too many urban rivers,” he writes, “it lies far below street level in a deep and narrow chasm, visible from above but almost out of reach.” Not quite; the homeless get to it easily enough. But the point is well taken; the Tiber stands as a rebuke in a city full of splendors but also of graffiti and litter, one that is “being internationalized at an unprecedented pace” and made ever more chaotic with bigger and more numerous motor vehicles. Step away from the river, and McGregor’s tour of the city becomes calmer and more reflective, and even longtime students of Roman history stand to learn something from his pages. Among the lessons offered along the way: The Basilica Julia represents a major urban renewal project on the part of Julius Caesar, who bought up a big chunk of the ancient Forum at “Manhattan prices” (whether of Pieter Minuit or Donald Trump we do not know) for the purpose. The Piazza di Spagna is so named because the Spanish embassy was once located there, and with it the office of the Institute for the Propagation of Faith—for it made sense for the proselytizers to associate with busy conquerors. Benito Mussolini engineered some urban renewal of his own, clearing out hundreds of houses in order to make his grand Via del Impero. And so on, in a wealth of detail and with well-chosen illustrations. Well worth consulting before planning a tour of the Eternal City.
McGregor might have spent more time—or time at all—on certain well-known points on the Roman map (the Campo dei Fiori, the Gardens of Sallust, the Baths of Caracalla), but Georgina Masson’s Companion Guide to Rome (1974) fills in the blanks.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-674-01911-3
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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